14

Users with 25k+ reputation have access to site analytics, which shows some information about traffic sources and also about number of posts, votes and traffic.

I found this older feature request which is marked : Could moderators of a Stack Exchange site be granted access to Google Analytics, for SEO purposes? However, it is from 2010 and the (status-completed) tag was added in 2011 - so it is older than the privilege for regular users, which exists since 2015. So it is possible that the moderators were granted in 2011 access to the same thing which is now available also to 25k+ users.

Question: Do moderators have access to more detailed analytics than 25k+ users? If that's the case, what kind of additional data can they see?

I am asking partly because of the recent discussion on MathOverflow Meta, asking about search terms which lead users to that site: How do off-topic question askers find MO?

EDIT: I found also this post from 2017 - which suggests that the mods had access to search keywords at the time: Which data from the moderator analytics can I share?

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
17

There is indeed an analytics page in the moderator section of the site, but it's just a worse designed version of the 25k Site Analytics page, plus a useless list of search keywords; not as bad as in the screenshot here, but e.g. for Chess Stack Exchange these are the only entries:

Source Visits
(not provided) 722,932
(not set) 17,443
boris spassky 1,938
how to get a chess move officially recognized 1,938

I'm having a hard time figuring out what the last group of people wants to achieve; perhaps they think they've played a novelty but I'm not sure ...

Improve this answer
9
  • 5
    That is...impressively useless.
    – Ryan M
    May 25, 2021 at 7:39
  • 2
    .... Its better than MSEs
    – Journeyman Geek
    May 25, 2021 at 8:47
  • 1
    Do you think "Search Keywords" is bugged? Both your provided sources' visits are 1938. (I'm not counting "not provided" or "not set") CR has three provided sources, all with 1847 visits. Seems to me like the visits aren't quite right. Whilst I don't know Java, I'm doubtful "ie compatibility with java code" would be searched ~2k times.
    – Peilonrayz
    May 25, 2021 at 10:08
  • 1
    @Peilonrayz it has always been "buggy" (status by design), as can be seen on the linked meta post from 2012 on this answer.
    – Meta Andrew T.
    May 25, 2021 at 10:18
  • 4
    That list does its best to organize whatever the Google Analytics API tells it (which is wildly inconsistent and heavily rate-limited by Google). There was a time when the 15 or so of us early pro-tem mods just knew that, when the stats were made available, but it might be worth documenting them as a trick-and-pony show that may or may not contain anything valuable.
    – Tim Post
    May 25, 2021 at 13:54
  • “it's just a worse designed version of the 25k Site Analytics page,” maybe add a feature request asking SE to fix this?
    – Ekadh Singh - Reinstate Monica
    May 25, 2021 at 18:23
  • @EkadhSingh I'd rather have them focus on the parts used by more users (which they do). The 25k Site Analytics page looks decent enough and I always use that one.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    May 25, 2021 at 18:30
  • As another datapoint, this was provided by a moderator on MO: "(not provided): 1777449 visits, (not set) 253729 visits, curve similarity: 1350 visits".
    – Martin
    Jun 7, 2021 at 7:09
  • 1
    @EkadhSingh Maybe this post from 2012 is along the lines what you suggested: Fix the Moderator Site Analytics. It is marked as (status-bydesign).
    – Martin
    Jun 7, 2021 at 7:11

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .